How to Build an Android: The True Story of Philip K. Dick's Robotic Resurrection

David F. Dufty

Henry Holt and Company, 273 pages

David F. Dufty
David F. Dufty is a senior research officer at the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Memphis at the time the android was being
developed and worked closely with the team of scientists who created it. He completed a
psychology degree with honors at the University of Newcastle and has a PhD in psychology from Macquarie University.

Just over seven years ago, the head of Philip K Dick went missing from an America West Airlines flight between Dallas and
Las Vegas. A tired roboticist, transferring the talking robotic replication of Dick's head from one tech presentation to another,
left it in an overhead baggage locker. An incident which has already inspired a radio
play (Gregory Whitehead's Bring Me The Head of Philip K Dick) and received substantial media coverage at the time, it
initially seemed to me somewhat too slight to merit book-length treatment. Perhaps a long piece in Wired would do
it justice. And indeed, surveying what other reviewers have made of the book (David F. Dufty has handily compiled prior
reviews, including poor ones, on his website), I find that some
have concluded with my initial
impression. For instance, New Scientist's
Sally Adee found
"50 pages of detailed historical introductions to every last person involved in the android project... Dufty recounts
conversations in exhausting detail, and finds nothing too small or insignificant to share with the reader: we learn where
the Starbucks is at several convention centres, we learn of one room that "the frame was made out of timber." We learn
that Google created a famous search engine."

I however found Adee's criticism unfair, and somewhat beside the point. Dufty, a postdoc in the University of Memphis at
the same time as many of the events described and therefore working with many of the personalities involved, has crafted a
readable narrative which ranges from the nature of academic politics (and the grant applications that take up most of any
senior researchers time) to the distinctions between Alan Turing's and Philip K Dick's visions of what distinguishes -- or
could distinguish -- computers from humans. In the end, the book dealt with weighty themes, some of the weightiest themes
we can think of. As Henry Markham of the Blue Brain project so eloquently describes in
his TED talk on
the subject, computational simulation of the human brain is one of the grandest challenges we can conceive (and possibly
an unattainable one, although that's another debate) Dufty may have a somewhat flat, deadpan style, but it reminded me of
the dictum (possibly one of Robert Louis Stevenson's) that extraordinary narratives should have an unadorned, simple style.

If the book has a protagonist, it is the man who left the head in the overhead luggage compartment on that fateful flight,
David Hanson, a trained sculptor turned roboticist who passionately argued -- contra to the prevailing wisdom in the robotics
community that aesthetics don't matter -- that beautiful and lifelike humanoid robots were crucial in the development of
robots that would truly revolutionise our lives. Hanson emphatically rejected the notion of the "uncanny valley," the
supposed phenomenon whereby, as robotic models and digital representations of humans come closer and closer to being
lifelike (while missing the mark slightly), we are more and more repulsed. Intuitively the uncanny valley makes
sense to many, yet as Hanson has pointed out there is a lack of empirical evidence to support its existence.

Artificial intelligence has evolved to become focused on specific tasks, often those of intellectual prowess (such as beating
Garry Kasparov at chess) rather than the overall simulation of human mental functioning in all its manifestations. This has
lead to great, headline-catching successes (such as beating Garry Kasparov at chess) but has arguably lead away from a
visionary, transformational view of the possibilities of AI. Hanson advocates approach to robotics grounded more in a
gestalt view of humanity and human-ness than the mere performance of tasks in isolation, and one which emphasises the
aesthetic nature of the whole android concept. For Hanson, leaps of scientific progress are as much artistic and
aesthetic as anything else. Dufty describes the combination of sculpting craft and high tech that goes into the creation
of a Hanson style robot very well.

Philip K Dick was an ideal candidate for potential immortalisation as a robot head in many ways. Obviously, his fiction
had dealt explicitly with themes of humanity and humanoid robots, and the difficulty distinguishing between them. Empathy,
rather than Turing's imitable intellectual functioning, was the key. Dick has become more than a cult figure and is now
widely regarded as a key American author of the second half of the Twentieth Century. Any Dick related project will garner
attention, and the project coincided with the production of the Richard Linklater film A Scanner Darkly, and indeed was
identified as a publicity aid for the film. Also, Dick's reputation as a sort of neo-gnostic eccentric meant that
elliptical or cryptic responses which might otherwise be seen as failures of artificial intelligence would be seen as just
typical Philip K Dick.

Another characteristic of Dick made him an ideal subject for such a project. Although he was dead and therefore his
head couldn't be directly modelled from life, there was a vast archive of conversations he had had with all comers in his
California bungalow in the 70s, when his house had been a sort of perpetual symposium of dropouts and outcasts with
whom he would hold court. These conversations covered a vast range of topics, esoteric and everyday, which allowed the
team to create a bank of possible responses to a great deal of questions. They also programmed some standard responses
to questions such as "what is your name?" They never programmed Dick with a response to "do androids dream of electric sheep?"

The head was a hit at the various conferences and exhibitions it was displayed at, to the extent that each member of the
public who patiently queued up to meet it could only have a minute or two of interaction. Dick's daughters were consulted
about the project, and after being convinced of the good intentions of those involved agree, but had an understandable
ambivalence about it. The head did tend to get caught in infinite verbal loops, which the roboticists tried to manage
by creating a "kill switch" to terminate logorrheic conversations. In its exhibited life the head was, to a certain
degree, something of a
Mechanical Turk, with a human behind
the scenes desperately trying to maintain the illusion of spontaneous conversation.

I was reading the English psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary around the same time as Dufty's
book. McGilchrist's book is a massive, sweeping, visionary book which argues that the division between the two hemispheres of
the brain -- the one which is grossly simplified into the dichotomy of logical left brain and creative right brain -- has been
not only a determinant of human history and culture but THE great determinant. McGilchrist has marshalled an enormously
impressive range of philosophical, empirical, artistic and other forms of evidence for his argument, and while it is not
utterly persuasive in all respects and hemispherical specialisation is itself far from a binary, dichotomous phenomenon,
it is a book worth arguing with. In any case, McGilchrist again and again assails what he terms the left-brain tendency
towards decontextualized analysis and away from an appreciation of holistic and of nuance. Artificial Intelligence's
turn to a task-focused approach is, in McGilchrist's terms, a classic case of the triumph of the left brain.

Dufty's book is deceptive. Initially it seems a rather bald account of the story of Dick's head, but it builds into
a thought-provoking book. Dufty marries the exciting, speculative world of contemporary AI and robotics with the prosaic
reality of grant applications and presentations at noisy, busy, conferences. There is an amusing thread of Talking
Heads references throughout -- indeed David Byrne is a not insignificant player in the story . One of these references
is slightly off the mark though -- while Talking Heads did do a version of "Take Me To The River," it is originally
an Al Green song. Why does this come up? You'll have to read the book to see.

Seamus Sweeney is a freelance writer and medical graduate from Ireland.
He has written stories and other pieces for the website Nthposition.com and other publications.
He is the winner of the 2010 Molly Keane Prize.
He has also written academic articles as Seamus Mac Suibhne.